Reagan's backers seek memorials
WASHINGTON -- As mourners gathered to pay their respects before Ronald Reagan's casket yesterday, members of Congress and conservative activists were working to seize the moment to create more-enduring Reagan memorials.
The plans include Senate majority leader Bill Frist's legislation to rename the Pentagon for Reagan, four separate bills to place Reagan's profile on the $10 bill, the $20 bill, the 50-cent piece, and the dime, and renewed calls for Congress to waive the 25-year waiting period to place a memorial on the Mall.
President Bush yesterday pledged to consider the new proposals to honor Reagan, saying, "I give a speech tomorrow, and then I will reflect on further ways to honor a great president."
The proposals, some of which had been percolating long before Reagan died last week at 93, spring from the same emotions that made Reagan's presidency a landmark for conservatives: a sense that the inspirational aspects of conservatism have not received their proper recognition in American history.
Washington sparkles with monuments recalling not only great men but also great liberal movements: The eternal flame burning at John F. Kennedy's grave in Arlington, Va., marks the hope of the New Frontier; the new memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt includes depictions of New Deal social programs and activism for women and minorities; and the Lincoln Memorial houses the ghosts not only of the Great Emancipator but also of black opera singer Marian Anderson's landmark concert and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.
"Liberals, the left, big-government supporters -- whatever you call them, statists do a better job of using the state to highlight how great they are," said Grover Norquist, a longtime tax opponent and Reagan enthusiast. "Individualists are not as good at calling attention to themselves."
The result is a surfeit of celebration of the liberal movements of recent history and little or no recognition for conservatives, Norquist said.
"Conservatives and liberals all claim Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln," he said. "But if you look at the modern memorials, they're more liberals. You've got a big Woodrow Wilson Institute funded by the federal government. You've got the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. You've got the FDR Memorial."
Norquist is the founder of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, created in late 1997 to place memorials to Reagan in all 3,067 counties in the United States. There are now 52 "dedications" to Reagan, according to the group, including Reagan National Airport, across the Potomac River from Washington. But Norquist sees many more on the horizon, with dozens of bills before Congress and state legislatures.
Since the former president's death on Saturday, other proposals have popped up, including Frist's plan to rename both the Pentagon and the US Missile Defense Agency for Reagan. On Tuesday, Representative Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, proposed a bill to put Reagan on the 50-cent piece. It joined existing bills proposed by other Republican representatives to add Reagan's profile to the $10 bill, the $20 bill, and the dime.
Reagan's image would replace those of the late Democratic presidents Kennedy on the 50-cent piece and Roosevelt on the dime, or a Reagan dime could be introduced into circulation along with the Roosevelt coin.
Meanwhile, conservative commentators have pointed to the grieving surrounding Reagan's death to justify waiving the 25-year waiting period to place a monument to a deceased figure on the Mall, the broad parklike space for monuments running between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. It is home to memorials ranging from one for Ulysses S. Grant to one for Vietnam veterans. The waiting period had been signed into law by Reagan himself.
Still, Norquist said Congress should feel free to do what it wants -- it voted for the waiting period and it could choose to override its own law. Even in that case, Norquist said, it would take a number of years to settle on an appropriate design for the memorial.
"What will happen is, Reagan will be put on a piece of currency this year," he said.
"We put FDR on the dime within a year of his death, JFK on the 50-cent piece, Eisenhower on the silver dollar, all within a year. So that's the timetable. Then we'll start talking, get together, begin planning for the permanent memorial" on the Mall.
The urgency with which activists such as Norquist have pursued Reagan memorials has irritated some other conservatives, who feel that breaking the rules, even for a good cause like honoring a late president, is not the conservative way.
"That law's there for a reason," said Ronald Kaufman, political director to the first President Bush. "And as a conservative, I support the idea to give history a chance. I think this week has proven what we as a country think of President Reagan."
Still, the monument issue has played into a sense of unfairness for some conservatives, a feeling that only liberals get to convey their passions in expressive ways.
It was this frustration that Reagan helped cure, infusing conservative politics with a sense of warmth to go along with its principles.
"Conservatives tend to feel unloved -- as if it's a lonely, unappreciated job but someone's got to do it," said Michael Corgan, a history professor at Boston University. "You hear that in the military, too, and to some extent it's true."
But Reagan was a figure of affection as well as admiration, a leader worthy of the title of head of state, Corgan said.
"The Democrats see the president as the chief operating officer; Republicans see the president as chief executive officer," he added. "Reagan understood that role better than anyone since Roosevelt. Kennedy had flickers of it, but Reagan had more." 